We Make Chocolate Differently. On Purpose.
Where It All Started
In the spring of 2005, Peter Crabtree was 15 years old and a freshman at West Sound Academy in Poulsbo. When his high school culinary arts class made chocolate truffles one afternoon, something clicked. He went home that day thinking about shelf life, cost per piece, and how many he could sell.
He negotiated after-school access to his teacher's equipment, bought the ingredients, made his first test batch, and sold them to students and teachers at school. That summer — still 15 — he had a booth at the Poulsbo Farmers Market, which was just getting started itself. He landed his first wholesale account with a regional grocery chain before he had a licensed kitchen to fulfill it, which is exactly why he built one — in a vacant storefront his grandfather's company owned, called in every favor he had, and opened for business.
His mom Colleen became his business partner — not because she had capital to invest, but because a 15-year-old can't sign a lease. That's where their partnership began, and it has never stopped.
Peter ran the business through high school, added espresso to the menu, and opened a small retail storefront — all before graduating. He briefly left for Seattle University and a co-founded startup in energy management, but chocolate pulled him back. In 2011, with a thousand square feet of new space next door and a clear vision for what the business needed to become, he launched ChocMo — Chocolate and More — and added the tagline that still defines the brand today: Deliberate Chocolate.
The name wasn't marketing. It was a commitment.
Deliberate Chocolate
How We Make Our Chocolate
Most chocolate starts somewhere else and arrives at the chocolatier's door ready to melt and mold. Our dark chocolate doesn't. We make our dark chocolate and drinking chocolate from the cacao bean — sorting, roasting, cracking, refining, blending, tempering, and finishing every piece by hand. Seven steps. No shortcuts. It takes longer, costs more, and produces chocolate that tastes like nothing you'll find in a grocery store aisle. Our milk and white chocolate confections are crafted from carefully selected premium couverture — chosen with the same standard we apply to everything: only what's worth using makes it into our kitchen. That's the point.
Bean Sorting
Cacao beans are sorted by size to ensure even roasting and consistent flavour.
Roasting & Cooling
Beans are roasted in a rotating drum, then slowly cooled to preserve flavour and prevent overheating.
Cracking & Winnowing
Roasted beans are cracked and the husks removed, leaving pure cacao nibs.
Refining the Cacao
Cacao nibs are refined and ground into a smooth cacao mass without overheating or altering the flavour profile.
Blending & Sifting
Cacao butter, sugar and sunflower lecithin are carefully blended together, then sifted to achieve a perfectly smooth, uniform texture.
Tempering
The chocolate is heated and cooled to a precise temperature to stabilise the cocoa butter crystals.
Finished by Hand
Our chocolatiers decorate and finalise every confection before it is packaged and placed on display.
Seven steps. All done with intention. That's what Deliberate Chocolate means to us — not as a tagline, but as a standard we've held ourselves to since the beginning.
